Saturday, June 20, 2015

Musical Interludes I: Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophüls, 1948)

Jakob Gimpel's hands playing Liszt's "Un Sospiro" in Letter from an Unknown Woman.

Every time
someone is playing a musical instrument in a movie, I can't help but pay
attention to how realistic the performance is. And since I'm an amateur piano
player myself (something my neighbors will never stop thanking for) I
particularly enjoy scrutinizing finger movements on the piano keyboard when an
actor is performing, or pretending to. Do you have the same compulsion?

The much-abused
"realism", as elusive a concept as the reality it pretends to
postulate, possibly has a more straightforward meaning when it comes to music
performances in movies. In principle, it's always possible to determine if the performer's
gestures correspond to the notes heard on the soundtrack – provided that we can
see the performer's hands clearly enough – or if instead there's no match at
all. This is particularly true of the piano, since it's easier to visually
identify a note by a piano key being pressed than, say, by a guitar string
being plucked. How much, we could ask, do filmmakers care about authenticity in
musical performances? Conversely, how much do we accept playback as a part of
cinematic artifice?

First of
all, we can distinguish three degrees of realism in film scenes involving
musical performances. Why exactly three? Well, I guess in some way we are all
victims of Hegel's trichotomy.

1) The melody has no resemblance whatsoever with the actor's
gestures. This rarely happens as a result of a conscious choice (see
the trumpet scene in Mulholland Drive). More often, pragmatic
considerations or a mere lack of concern come into play.

2)
The performance matches roughly the soundtrack. In this case
the match isn't perfect, yet a certain effort has been put into coordinating
soundtrack and gestures. A nice example is the furious piano duet between
Donald and Daffy Duck in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, where the perfect
rhythmic synchronization between action and music isn't accompanied by an
equally perfect correspondence between melody and fingering.

Donald Duck in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

3) The performance matches the soundtrack with high precision. Here
we could make a further distinction, and ask whether (a) the music we hear is
actually being played by the actor himself/herself, or if (b) actor and
performer are two different persons. For example, I'd bet that the piece played
by Miss Coggins in Turner ("Dido's Lament" by
Henry Purcell) comes out of the piano we see on screen, courtesy of actress Karina
Fernandez; whereas Elijah Wood isn't actually playing Victor Reyes's "La
Cinquette" in Grand Piano, no matter how realistic his
performance – composer John Lenehan is playing. In case (a) it's also useful to
distinguish between a performance recorded live onstage like in our Turner example (perhaps the highest degree of realism
achievable) and one synchronized with images in post-production, like in most music videos.

This
differentiation in no way implies a hierarchy. Realism is only one of the
options available to filmmakers, and we shouldn't be biased toward it. Sometimes
it's just out of place, or would require too disproportionate an effort to be
achieved. For one thing, not all actors are musicians, and even in this lucky circumstance,
filmmakers could choose to shoot with little regard to verisimilitude anyway, for
example due to time constraints, or in case the piece were too demanding for
the performer's skills. Instead, what we should ask ourselves is whether
realism is or isn't functional to a particular scene.

A further
clarification: Of course we are chiefly speaking of diegetic music, i.e. music
that is part of the story world, although I have a nice example in mind that
stretches categories a bit – and no, it's not the harpist-in-the-closet scene in
Bananas. Maybe I'll talk about it some other time. By the
way, if you'd like to share your observations, suggest any film scene you find
interesting, or just remind me of how futile the job I'm doing here is, please don't
hesitate to use the comment section below.

The scenes I'm
going to discuss here involve the piano (as I've said, this is an instrument
about which I'm less likely to talk utter nonsense). The film in question is Letter from an Unknown Woman, Max Ophüls's 1948 melodrama based
on the novella of the same name by Austrian author Stefan Zweig. It is the
story of a life-long obsession: Young Lisa (Joan Fontaine) becomes infatuated
with a philanderer and second-rate concert pianist named Stefan Brand (Louis
Jourdan) who lives next to her apartment. After a night of love that fades
completely from his memory, but Lisa will treasure as the most significant
event in her life, she becomes pregnant. She eventually decides to keep the baby without
telling him, unwilling as she is to beg him to take the responsibility for it. Years
pass and Lisa gets married with another man, but her love for Stefan is hard to
forget. They meet once more years later, but again, he only has a vague feeling
of having met her somewhere before. Tons of melodrama ensue. In a way, one
might see the story as a powerful warning against the long-term side effects of
one-night stands.

Ok, I
confess my wholehearted irritation at this film. Its obvious sympathy for the
victim seems to imply that Lisa's conduct is praiseworthy, even heroic in its
own perverse way. But a woman who willingly chooses to sacrifice her life to a
man who apparently deserves all our contempt (but according to modern standards
would just pass as a mild womanizer) is at best masochistic and at worst stupid
(reverse the order if you prefer). I couldn't swallow the Grand-Finale-That-Makes-A-Lot-Of-Sense
either. This could really be the most antifeminist movie I've ever seen; pro-abortionists might find in the story a good argument in support of the cause. You
might say that all this has more to do with the book than with the film itself,
but heck, it wasn't me who decided to make a movie out of such a pathetic
material. (I began trying to be as objective as possible, and ended up bashing
an all-time classic... I suppose Umberto Eco would count me among those "legions
of imbeciles" he recently inveighed against.[1])

Putting
aside my personal aversions for a moment, let's consider the scenes in which actor
Louis Jourdan plays the piano. In order to properly judge the effectiveness of
these scenes, we have to take into account that music for Stefan is not only
his job, but the very essence of his free-spirited life. And what's more important, his
talent is what makes Lisa fall in love with him in the first place. Thus you
would expect his piano performances to be at least mildly realistic; well, that's
what I expected. Curiously, instead, Jourdan moves his hands
randomly on the keyboard, with the fingering sensationally out of sync with the
notes being played. But what catches the eye most, and should also be evident
to non-players, is that his body movements are stiff and awkward. In fact, one
doesn't use only the fingers to play, but the whole body, an aspect Jourdan
doesn't pay the slightest attention to. The impression is that he had never sat
in front of a piano before; we can only imagine Joan Fontaine's efforts to
appear ecstatically enraptured as Jourdan plays a discordant sequence of notes.

A not-so-enraptured Joan Fontaine.

In another
film, having an actor ineptly faking a pianist's gestures wouldn't be as
catastrophic as it is here. But in this film, it's not just a matter of realism.
I think Jourdan's inexperience with the piano deprives his character of much of
his charm, to the point that it becomes hard to believe that a whole existence
could be sacrificed to him by virtue of his talent. Moreover, Jourdan's manifest
unfamiliarity with music strikes a false note, if you pass me the expression, in
a film which is otherwise as visually accurate as only an Ophüls film can be. Ben
Hur's wristwatch wasn't half as distracting. (I know, I know, it's an urban
legend. But if it had happened, it wouldn't have been so distracting.)

A scene
near the film's beginning, however, is shot in a completely different way, and
seems to confirm that Ophüls had some concerns about Jourdan's ineptitude at
the piano after all. In fact, this scene intercuts shots of the actor half
hidden behind a grand piano with low-angle close-ups of hands performing Franz
Liszt's “Un Sospiro”, while Lisa is shown dreamily listening to the music in
the house's courtyard. No wonder that fingering and music here are perfectly
synced, since those hands are not Jourdan's, but belong to Polish concert pianist
Jakob Gimpel (1906 – 1989),
who not only recorded the soundtrack but is also credited as on-screen participant.
In this case, having a piano double doing the hard work doesn't sacrifice the
scene, because music isn't something the protagonists are experiencing together;
what matters is the effect of music on Lisa, whose existence Stefan ignores. But
Ophüls must have felt that this wasn't a satisfying option when it came to
showing their only night together. In what is the film's turning point, music
is supposed to make them connect, and acts quasi as a Hays Code-safe foreplay
for their never-shown sexual intercourse. Framing them from the chest up, or
intercutting shots of hands playing, would have just killed all the romanticism
and the suffused sensuality of the encounter.

We know
that the choice of Jourdan was imposed by Rampart Productions, the production
company formed in 1948 by Joan Fontaine and her second husband William Dozier. Letter from an Unknown Woman was their first film produced
together; they fell in love with Zweig's novella, and decided that Jourdan was perfect
for the role. Jourdan is undoubtedly good in the film as a callous, self-centered
Lothario; we cannot blame him for not also being a piano virtuoso. It is interesting,
however, to register that his deficient skills as a pianist played little or no
part in his casting.

Was there
ever a more inconsequential topic? you might ask. If there certainly are more significant
factors contributing to the film experience, nonetheless it seems to me
interesting to explore how diegetic music can shape our responses to movies,
and play an essential role in creating the fictional world in which we immerse
ourselves. For me, watching Jourdan plonking away on the piano was the proverbial
hole in the paper sky [2] (or the bug in the matrix, if you prefer), but it's
very likely that viewers with no experience of playing piano would have a
totally different response.

In
conclusion, I'm left with some questions:

How has
the depiction of musical performance evolved across the history of cinema?

Is there
any correlation between the accuracy of such depiction and geographical/social
factors? I'd expect verisimilitude to increase with the development of musical
literacy in a particular country/historical period.

How has
our sensibility toward musical performance changed from the early years of
cinema? How does musical foreknowledge shape our response to a film?

What do film
scenes involving diegetic music tell about the overall film? What
considerations guide filmmakers' decisions in regard to realism in such scenes?

Tough
questions, for sure; I don't expect to ever answer any of them. I'll just keep
them in mind as I (hopefully) consider more "Musical Interludes".

[1]^ "Social
media have given the right of speech to legions of imbeciles."This
caustic remark, pronounced on June 10th, 2015 in occasion of the conferment to
Eco of the Degree honoris causa in Communication and Media Culture by the
University of Turin,
has raised many controversies on the Italian newspapers and on the internet.

[2]^ "The whole difference, Signor Meis, between ancient and modern tragedy
consists in this, believe me: a hole in the paper sky." (Luigi Pirandello, The Late Mattia Pascal)

1 comment:

watched this remarkable 1927 Jean Epstein silent film to learn something about French Impressionism, an avant-garde film movement that developed in France in the 1920s and had great influence on later European cinema.

I came across while watching movies. .Thanks for sharing..^__^..I will tell my sister and friends about your blog...pls continue to write an article...I'm looking forward for the upcoming posts you will be posting

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